Harvesting Hope – a future for sustainable agriculture?

OUR changing climate and its influence on agricultural practice in Ireland, and on the health and wellbeing of our farmers, was the theme of a fascinating conference that took place in Gurteen College on Saturday September 20^th last.

More than any other profession, farmers are in the spotlight of the climate juggernaut that is coming ever closer each passing year. We see the evidence all around us: heatwaves and forest fires in summer, destructive storms in winter. At a practical level – and Harvesting Hope was focused absolutely on the practical – Ireland is facing punitive penalties in five years’ time if it fails to meet its carbon targets. All this creates a sense of impending threat to which there are only two possible responses: we can deny it and continue as we are, or we can try to do something about it.

This conference was asking a number of questions. It was asking farmers – how can you make those small changes that will put you on the road of greater sustainability? It was asking rural communities (and indeed, urban ones) – how can you support your farmers in this huge task on our doorstep? And it was asking our churches – what role to you have, who preach a loving creator God and a responsible stewardship of his creation?

These are big questions. They can’t be solved in one day in one place. They are, in a real sense, big “journey” questions. That is an overused word these days. We all seem to be on a journey somewhere. But we have another word in the churches, a word that adds a spiritual dimension. That word is ‘pilgrimage’. Rather than deny what is happening – which is the same as making it worse – we can join a pilgrimage to a more responsible, more aware, and better future, where we see our living planet, not as our distant ancestors did, as something God created for us ‘to have dominion over’, but as we now know it to be, a profoundly old and complex ecosystem where everything is inter-connected in ways we are only beginning to understand.

The conference was organised by the Church of Ireland diocese of Tuam, Limerick and Killaloe in collaboration with the Methodist Church in Ireland. The two churches signed a Covenant in 2002 pledging to a growing unity and shared life, and this was clearly in evidence in the support shown by Gurteen College to the event.

The setting was perfect: a college founded by a group of Methodist farmers in the 1940s who wanted to show their support for the new Irish state that had just come through the economic war of the 1930s and the “Emergency” of the 1940s. What made it doubly appropriate for them was that Gurteen is itself seeking to educate young farmers to farm more sustainably and has recently teamed up with the Technological University of the Shannon to provide the practical element of the degree course in sustainability in agriculture. Ella Camon and Michael Grace, final year students in that programme, spoke at the end of the morning session about their future hopes and plans.

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Before that, they discussed the place of organics in a longer term farming strategy. Ken Gill, their first speaker, is an organic beef and tillage farmer based in north Offaly. He has a 60 cow Autumn calving herd finishing all progeny at two years and between 5 and 10 hectares of oats that he sells to Flahavans. The farm also has semi-natural woodlands, an oak plantation and some willow as an energy crop.

Transitioning to organic farming, Ken found himself to be more productive. As he said to John Gill, “organic farming absolutely focuses you”. He has simplified his tillage system to oats, grass and red clover and no longer needs to spray for weed control. But Ken was honest about his long term future. For the size of his farm, collaboration with a tillage farm would create a larger organic unit and make both farms more sustainable.

The second speaker was Kim McCall who, with his French wife Mireille, farms 232 acres in Kildare, near the Wicklow border. They run a 60 cow pedigree herd of Aubrac and a small flock of sheep. Fully organic as of January 2025, there is also 30 acres of trees, soft wood and hard wood. The farm has a variety of habitats contributing to insect, flora and fauna diversity. The farm is big enough to be profitable and allow plenty of space for nature.

Kim showed that there is plenty of support for farmers who want to make the transition to organic methods, both formal and informal groups, and urged farmers “not to paint yourselves into a corner”. The market needs plenty of variety and Irish farming is no longer only about milk, beef and sheep.

This brought them to the need to educate consumers. When we think about the cost of our food, we need to think of the cost, not just to our salaries and wage packets, but to our health and wellbeing and to the health and wellbeing of our children, our society and our planet – and that includes our rivers and soils, our cultivated land and our wild places.

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In the afternoon, they discussed the health and wellbeing of farmers who have to make a living in these challenging times. This session touched on a number of profoundly important issues such as succession, suicide, loneliness and isolation.

Anne Marie Doheny, who lectures at Gurteen, distinguished between equality and fairness in resolving difficult human situations concerning farm succession. The farm is frequently a home as well as a business and can mean different things to different family members. By carefully talking out these often unspoken feelings of identity, ownership, and entitlement, solutions can be found that might not be equal but they can still be fair. That was the thrust of Anne Marie’s message.

George Graham, who has founded the self-help group Awareness Head-to-Toe, then spoke powerfully about mental health, general health and farm safety awareness throughout the rural community.

Finally, Catherine Kenneally, representing the Embrace FARM organisation told them about the support they provide in situations of critical injury and death on the farm. Several moving personal stories emerged in the course of the afternoon session.

It seemed fitting therefore that they should finish with a short ecumenical service of thanksgiving for the harvest – two readings, four hymns and a powerful address by Dr John Feehan in which he challenged all to read the second bible, the book of nature, constantly being revealed to us through the many disciplines of science, which at both macro and micro levels, disclose the wonder, the beauty, the complexity and the diversity of the cosmos – of which our planet is our one and only home.

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